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‘Mist’ blankets tired plot

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Also by Matthew Straub:

Disney show 'King' of musicals (February 26, 2008)

by Matthew Straub

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

There are several elements from which horror films and thrillers tend to draw their strength. Sometimes it is from characters with lurking depths like Norman Bates, or from the meticulous, slow build of an FBI hunt aided by Hannibal the Cannibal, and sometimes they draw their strength from an intense realism, as in Hitchcock's "Rear Window." Stephen King's "The Mist," despite lacking all of these qualities, combines old-fashioned camera scares with an obvious but well-executed focus on mob mentality to cover up the absurdity of its plot and stop-motion spooks.

"The Mist" is a very difficult film to summarize without disclosing the details of its continuously heightening intensity. On a day following an unusually intense storm, a thick blanket of mist — and one might argue it is actually fog, but they've already made "The Fog," so that's out.

— conspicuously rolls over a tiny New England town. David Brayton (Thomas Jane, "The Punisher") and his son go to a grocery store with their neighbor to restock the food spoiling in their fridge after a power outage caused by the storm. The mist surrounds the store, and once clued in to the dangers lurking within it, the group has no choice but to stay put and fight for their lives through a series of increasingly horrific and progressively more absurd encounters.

As that plot stretches out (and occasionally stretches thin), it demands an increasing suspension of disbelief from the viewer. During the first encounter with the unexpected inhabitants of the mist (which is not so much the star of the show as a clumsy device to hide tentacles in), viewers might have difficulty refraining from rolling their eyes at something so ridiculously outlandish brought about by old-fashioned special effects so bad, it's tempting to write off as deliberately campy.

But a superb camera crew, brought in from TV's "The Shield," masks the hokey plot and scenery far better than the title character. The cinematographer may actually have had a better understanding of the story than the actors, who generally exhibited only two emotions: fear or determination. The cameras move fluidly throughout a relatively small space, standing still during tense moments and always toying with the limited visibility of the mist shrouding the world outside of the grocery store. The writing eventually takes the viewer out of the action, however. Written by Stephen King himself with the aid of director Frank Darabont (who also directed King's "The Green Mile"), the screenplay never strays from bump-in-the-night clichés.

The screenplay does avoid the trap of disjointed Stephen King stories like "Dreamcatcher," as while the origins of the mist is never really clarified, the focus on the mob dynamics of the characters make this unimportant. The best writing of this film has little to do with scare tactics at all. As the townspeople inside the grocery store grow increasingly hopeless they begin to turn toward a Bible-thumper obsessed with Judgment Day, played by Marcia Gay Harden ("The Invisible"). With her religious fundamentalist ballyhoo, she begins to divide the distraught group, clearly demonstrating the animalization of humanity in life-or-death situations as the town's irrational beliefs begin to take over any sense of proper judgment. This in itself is just as frightening as anything else in the movie and certainly more disturbing.

With more than 200 books to his name, Stephen King is bound to pound out something notable every once in a while. "The Mist" will never be regarded as anything near a masterpiece of horror, but that doesn't mean it isn't an engaging story with legitimate thrills, and "The Mist" is surely one Stephen King fans will not want to miss.

3 stars out of 5

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Anonymous (November 27, 2007 @ 10:40pm):

- avoid unnecessary adverbs.
- don't use the title of something twice in the same sentence, (as you did in the last sentence.)

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